Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Transfer Function

I've spent a couple of hours over the past few days transferring patterns to the plywood.  I still have quite a few parts to mark up, but am happy with the progress I'm making.  It seems like fast work, but oddly enough, takes longer than it seems.  I estimate that I've spent around 10 hours on it so far, and have only laid out the pieces on 3 sheets of the requisite 16 sheets of plywood.  This accounts for 26 of the 71 or so plywood parts in the boat.  Admittedly, those sheets of plywood have a large number of parts each, and some of the most complex parts in the boat (like the dreaded Bulkhead 7), so I am farther along than the numbers suggest. 
My biggest, and perhaps only, gripe about the full size patterns is that most of the symmetric parts (like the bulkheads) only contain one half of the part.  So, you have the mark half the part and the centerline, flip the pattern over, line up the centerlines and then mark the second half.  This creates chaos in two ways.  First, it makes it a little hard to make sure you've got the part laid out in the right spot on the plywood so that it doesn't overlap where other parts should be.  Second, you really have to be careful aligning the centerlines or else you'll end up with a funny shaped part.  So far, this hasn't introduced any errors that I'm aware of, but has forced me to spend a little extra time making sure everything is just right.  Don't get me wrong, using these full sized templates is quite simple.  But I'd have gladly paid the extra cost for the paper and ink required to print out full templates for the symmetric parts.

No comments:

Post a Comment